5	“We’re Not in Kansas Anymore!”

No master mariner dares to use it least he should be suspected of being a magician; nor would the sailors venture to go to sea under the command of a man using an instrument which so much appeared to be under the influence of the powers below.

—Guiot of Provins, ca. A.D. 1205

The Exxon Valdez left harbor on March 23, 1989, and within hours unleashed an ecological catastrophe as it ran aground on Bligh Reef 12:04 A.M. on March 24. The spilling of eleven million gallons of oil triggered a $5.3 billion lawsuit in a highly publicized court case. A decade later, the damage to the Prince Williams Sound is still evident if you literally scratch the surface of the ecosystem. The investigation focused on the circumstances leading up to the grounding, the absence of the captain from the bridge, and the failure of the third mate to follow a proper course, but there may have been other factors at work as well.

The powerful geomagnetic storm that triggered the Quebec blackout on March 13 was not the only event that rocked the magnetosphere that month. Ten days later, a secondary storm began fourteen hours before the Exxon Valdez ran aground. The IMP-8 research satellite recorded a powerful surge of high-energy electrons and protons lasting twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, images from the Dynamics Explorer satellite showed a bright crown of aurora girding the north polar zone, especially in the nighttime sector that included Canada and Alaska. Had the skies been clear over Valdez Harbor on March 24, sky watchers would have seen a marvelous Northern Lights display.

The displays, by themselves, have little consequence for navigation, but they do signal that powerful currents of electrons are flowing in the upper atmosphere, and these electrojet currents make themselves felt, magnetically, on the ground. Magnetic field data from middle-latitude observatories traced significant changes in the vertical component of the geomagnetic field. The “Dst” storm-time geomagnetic index, which tracks these changes, like a barometric reading, pitched up and down between March 22–25 as ionospheric currents flowed strongly but erratically and reduced the Earth’s field by up to 1 percent vertically. Meanwhile, magnetic observatories at Sitka, Barrow, and College, Alaska recorded up to one-degree changes in the direction of magnetic north. The Exxon Valdez ran aground in the middle of one of these magnetic excursions that occurred between 11:00 P.M. on March 23 and 12:30 A.M. on March 24.

After leaving the harbor, the Exxon Valdez, like other ships ahead of it, had to navigate through a narrowing of the channel. The Columbia Glacier ice flows had calved many icebergs, and these house-sized mountains of frozen water were now flowing into the channel, constricting it to a narrow 1,500-yard wide passage near Bligh Island. Records show that the Exxon Valdez made a bearing change at 11:39 P.M. on March 23 which was to be followed on autopilot for four miles before coming around the edge of the Columbia Glacier ice flow. Although there was no magnetic observatory at Valdez, and the nearest ones were at Sitka and College located hundreds of miles away, the magnetic conditions sensed by the three observatories were about the same. A magnetic compass on the Exxon Valdez would have detected up to 0.3-degree deviations from the intended bearing, which over a four-mile run would have added up to one hundred feet or so of deviation near the end of the run at Bligh Reef. This is only about one-ninth the length of the tanker. A second course change was planned at the end of the four-mile leg, and it is this one that, investigators demonstrated, came seven minutes too late. Because of the delay, the tanker overshot the narrow slot between the ice flow and the reef, and the rest is history.

Did the magnetic storm cause the grounding of the Exxon Valdez? Probably not. Two other ships, the Brooklyn and the Arco Juneau, had successfully navigated this channel between 10:47 A.M. and 7:22 P.M. on March 23 with no difficulty, and an even larger magnetic storm was in progress between 5:50 P.M. and 6:30 P.M. on that day, with deflections up to one degree. More important, quite a bit has happened to navigation technology in the last fifty years. The Exxon Valdez, one of the most sophisticated ships of its kind at the time, relied on LORAN-C signals to determine its course and not magnetic compass bearings.

This incident, then, seems to be a spectacular case in which a solar storm that presented large magnetic swings was in progress and a ship navigating a narrow channel was grounded, with the two events apparently unrelated. The initial expectation of cause and effect was based on the very logical premise that geomagnetic storms cause significant deviations in compass bearings. However, if no magnetic compass is used, then there can be no navigation impact, even by a major magnetic storm. But we now have to ask ourselves one further question. If the Exxon Valdez was immune to direct magnetic disruptions, could the LORAN-C system have been affected instead?

For this to be a viable possibility the storm-time conditions would have to produce significant propagation delays in the longwave LORAN-C navigation beacons that were used to figure bearings between 11:30 P.M. and 12:30 A.M. Reports on the events leading up to the grounding indicate there were frequent electromagnetic interruptions at the time that the Exxon Valdez left harbor. The “blip” representing the tanker on the radar screens apparently faded in and out of detectability as the ship passed Rocky Point, located just outside the Valdez Narrows harbor entrance. This radar problem was well known to the operators at the Valdez Coast Guard Station and, of itself, not a condition that had to do with solar storms. It was simply the consequence of not having a second radar station located near the mouth of the harbor to extend the range of the main installation at Valdez. Moreover, the third mate tested the navigation equipment at 7:24 P.M., before leaving the harbor, and this check apparently included the ship’s radar, gyrocompass, automatic pilot, and course indicator. Nothing out of the ordinary was discovered. One would expect that a storm-time process capable of significantly affecting navigation would have showed up just three hours before the grounding and at a time when the geomagnetic disturbances were even stronger.

So we come up empty handed. Even though a cursory examination of the Exxon Valdez grounding seemed to turn up an exciting new smoking gun for a very spectacular shipwreck, there appears to be no cause-and-effect link between the key events. Had the Exxon Valdez’s navigation been affected by even a one-degree error in its course, the several 100-foot error this would have caused near Bligh Reef would have initially made a difference but wouldn’t have avoided the inevitable impact. With a ship traveling at 20 feet per second, it would have just delayed the inevitable by a few more seconds.

Despite the occasional geomagnetic storm, we are fortunate to be living on a planet that has a well-defined magnetic field and has served us as a navigation reference for millennia. Had the situation been otherwise, ancient mariners may have had to steer their daytime courses using only nighttime stars and the daytime Sun as a guide. No one really knows exactly when the first person came up with the idea of using a rock to tell direction. It’s hard to imagine the trial-and-error process that could have led up to this discovery. But the history books are pretty clear that many thousands of years ago some nameless soul discovered that a particular kind of rock we now call lodestone (magnetite) does the trick.

The story seems to begin in ancient China, when Emperor Hoangti’s troops were in hot pursuit of Prince Tcheyeou in 2637 B.C. for reasons that are now lost to us. Ancient Chinese politics was a complex and ever changing arena. The troops eventually lost their way in a heavy fog, so the emperor constructed a chariot upon which stood a figure that always pointed south no matter how the chariot was directed. Nearly two millennia later, the Phoenician sage Sanconiathon wrote, “It was the God, Ouranos, who devised Betulae, contriving stones that moved as having life,” and even Homer, about 900 B.C., got into the act by mentioning this remarkable technology in the Odyssey,

In wondrous ships instinct with mind

No helm secures their course, no pilot guides

Like man intelligent, they plough the sea

Though clouds and darkness veil th’ encumbered sky

Fearless thro’ darkness and thru’ clouds they fly

During the last thousand years, the “secret weapon” of the Vikings evolved into the familiar magnetic compass that all scouts and ocean navigators rely on to see them to safe harbor. We don’t need lodestone anymore. A simple needle balanced midway between its ends suffices to point in a fixed direction. By 1600, William Gilbert, who was the personal physician to Queen Elizabeth, even wrote a book about how the Earth is one giant magnet with distinct north and south poles.

We are living at a time in the history of the Earth when the magnetic north-south field is very nearly aligned with the axis about which the Earth spins each day. We don’t know exactly how the Earth creates this field. Geophysicists think that the geomagnetic field is generated near the hot, electrically active core of the Earth where hundred-mile-wide currents of molten nickel flow along the equator. Like many rivers of water on the surface of the Earth, these subterranean currents are not steady either in space or time. Over thousands of years—even near the core of the Earth—things tend to slosh about a bit. If you were standing at the magnetic north pole, you would soon discover that it moves a hundred yards a day, and this forces compass navigators to buy new maps every ten years or so. Map makers and sellers since the eighteenth century enjoy this aspect of geophysics quite a bit and, over time, actually turn a profit from it. There are other, less predictable changes that occur with magnetic bearings if you have the patience to look for them.

In the early nineteenth century, Baron Alexander von Humbolt was one of those intrepid and world-renowned explorers who outfitted expeditions to Africa and elsewhere to catalog rare plants and animals. His popular stature was a combination of the measured studiousness of astronomer Carl Sagan and the down-and-dirty enthusiasm of Titanic discoverer Jim Ballard. In fact, the London Times regularly published Humbolt’s weekly letters from distant lands and jungles detailing his ongoing exploits. On one of his years off from studying wild and exotic fauna and flora, his interests turned to earlier eighteenth-century reports that compass needles didn’t always point in the same direction from moment to moment. He and an assistant decided to look into this behavior a bit more.

With a microscope, they made around-the-clock measurements of a compass needle’s direction every half-hour for over a year. What they uncovered were the usual, and sudden, erratic swings produced by lightning storms, but every once and a while other mysterious disturbances set their needle gyrating. It didn’t take long for them to realize that the strongest of these “magnetic storms” always seemed to happen when the Northern Lights could be seen dancing outside their window or were reported in neighboring lands to the north. This behavior was taken very seriously at the time, because in terms of our monetary system today, billions of dollars of commerce were at the mercy of ships steered by magnetic compass. Within a few years, Humbolt had dozens of “magnetic observatories” across the globe hard at work measuring compass needle gyrations and magnetic storms.

Magnetic storms are not something to trifle with. If you are a navigator, they can cause compass-bearing errors as large as several degrees, so that for up to a full day your bearings are completely unreliable and you might not even realize it. This is especially challenging and risky if you are trying to get through a tight channel in the dark or in inclement weather. The most dramatic impact of geomagnetic storms would be a shipwreck or a plane crashing into a mountainside. Few recorded instances of such tragic events are known; however, there are stories about a ship that ran aground on Bear Island just before World War II, and airplane pilots in Alaska have claimed that some crashes were caused by just such geomagnetic storms. The problem is that historical accounts of geomagnetically induced navigation problems are almost entirely anecdotal. The earliest account is reported in the American Journal of Science and Arts by a contributor named, simply, “A. de la Riva,”

M. de Tessan cites an observation made in 1818 by M. Baral, another French naval officer, on the same coasts of New Holland, who found that he had been making a wrong course from following his needle. . . . But on the evening of the same day, there was a brilliant aurora, and to this he attributes the deviation.

In addition to the many exciting changes in communication technology during the last one hundred years, even the magnetic compass was eventually eclipsed. Navigation could now be provided by a series of strategically placed transmitters that ships and planes could lock onto. Within a few years, the Long Range Aid to Navigation (LORAN) system had all but replaced navigation by stars and compass, although these might be used occasionally as backup aids. LORAN coverage was extended over combat areas and along Pacific supply lines, so that by the end of World War II about 30 percent of the Earth’s surface had been covered by LORAN. The system appeared to be resistant to geomagnetic storms, but they did have their weakness.

LORAN longwave signals could be affected by severe static, and to get a reliable and accurate bearing, you need to measure the arrival times of the signals from three stations. Because these signals have to bounce off the ionosphere to reach you, any changes in the ionosphere cause erratic increases or decreases in the signal’s travel time to your ship. This causes course errors just as surely as if you had been using a magnetic compass. For instance, during the March 13, 1989, solar storm activity and even several weeks prior to its onset, the ionosphere was severely affected by this major storm. A number of reports describe how this caused navigation signals to become unreliable for several days. Shortwave radio could not even be used to alert ships at sea to the problems with LORAN. Our previous question about the Exxon Valdez and its LORAN-C system now acquires a new and disturbing answer. Its instruments may, indeed, have been affected by the ionospheric disturbances that were probably in progress at the time. We will never know just how much of a factor this could have had in the catastrophe that followed.

Since the early 1990s, a new navigation technology has swept the scene: satellites. The Department of Defense launched twenty-four satellites to make up their Global Positioning System (GPS). Now, with a handset no bigger than a cellular telephone, you can find your instantaneous longitude and latitude no matter where you are on Earth or in orbit. Between five and eight of the satellites are above your horizon at any time, and your handset receives their timing signals. A computer chip inside uses the timing information to triangulate your position to within fifty feet or less. Even so, slight changes in the ionosphere caused by solar storms add minuscule delays to these signals and cause position estimates to vary by hundreds of yards. A major factor that is known to cause ionospheric changes is solar flares.

Solar flares can happen even when aurora or geomagnetic storms are not in progress, and they happen in broad daylight. When a flare erupts on the surface of the Sun facing the Earth, less than nine minutes later a powerful burst of X-ray and gamma ray radiation arrives at the Earth, followed an hour or so later by high-speed energetic particles. This “one-two punch” of matter and energy plays havoc with the daytime ionosphere and causes shortwave dropouts and radio navigation problems that can last for hours. Solar flares and geomagnetic storms are common enough, and navigation difficulties frequent enough, that sometimes the two are conjoined in time to paint a provocative picture.

During the March storm in 1989, the New York Times, and many other newspapers, reported a military helicopter crash near Tucson, Arizona killing fifteen people on March 12. It was a moonless night and the pilot was using night vision goggles to navigate their helicopter. The Air Force had flown many missions in this way and it was never cited as a contributing factor in any previous crash. Could this have been a navigation problem from geomagnetic disturbances that caused the Quebec blackout a day later? Investigations of the crash turned up the entirely plausible conclusion that there may have been too little ambient light for the goggles to work properly. The pilot was literally flying blind. Two trains collided head-on in Alberta and microwave-controlled traffic signals may have been affected by ionospheric disturbances. Although space weather expert Gordon Rosloker was prepared to give this testimony, the case was terminated before any aspect of this probable cause could be entered into the court records. In another incident, according to Joe Allen at NOAA, a commercial fishing ship was seized by the Australian Coast Guard in forbidden waters. The captain was arrested and ordered to stand trial. Navigation errors from the March 1989 geomagnetic storm may also have had a hand in this incident as well.

On March 11, 1989, at 1:10 P.M., Air Canada Flight 1363 crashed soon after takeoff, killing sixty-nine people during a snowstorm with one-half-mile visibility. Could this have been caused by navigation problems? Again the answer is no. Investigators concluded that the plane had been overloaded and pilot error was to blame for the tragedy. This crash, by the way, was the major news story in Canada during the entire March 1989 solar storm episode and displaced the Quebec blackout to page 3 in the Toronto Star.

During the February 9, 1907, Great Aurora, Atlantic transport liner Menominae from Antwerp was struck off Beachy Head on the evening of February 9 by the French steamer President Leroy Lallier. The steamer was observed to move erratically in course before collision. During another severe Great Aurora on February 24, 1956, the paper announced that six planes with sixteen missionaries on board were reported missing. The planes had left Cuba en route to the neighboring island of Jamaica at 2:00 P.M. but had never arrived some four hours later. There were no clouds or storms in the area.

These examples show rather dramatically why it is so important to study specific events carefully before jumping to the conclusion that one caused or facilitated the other. It is not sufficient to merely note a coincidence in time and a suspected pathway of impact. Shipwrecks and crashes happen all the time. The odds are very good that they will happen during solar storm disturbances, which are also rather common during any given year. It’s just a matter of the odds catching up with you every once in a while.

Magnetic compasses are not the only things that seem to need the magnetic field as a stable reference in time and space. There are many other “systems” on the Earth that need to sense their direction to get to food, shelter, or simply maintain equilibrium in a thousand other ways. The geomagnetic field is so subtle you can’t feel its presence outright. But somehow, over millions of years, it seems that organic evolution has managed to detect this force by trial and error and incorporate it into the guidance systems of everything from bacteria to sharks. Even the common monarch butterfly relies on a magnetic sense to orient itself on its annual southward migration to Mexico. Beyond airplanes and ships, there are many other natural systems that could be sensitive to geomagnetic storms, at least in principle. In this particular arena, we have to walk even more carefully among the possible instances of cause and effect.

Back in 1974, Richard Blakemore and Richard Frankel at the University of New Hampshire uncovered a remarkable trick that certain kinds of freshwater bacteria seemed to share. As they grow to maturity, each of them creates within their single-celled bodies nearly two dozen pure cubical crystals of magnetite. Like pearls on a string, the crystals are oriented with the long axis of the bacterium. One can imagine that by some evolutionary process primitive organisms grew a single crystal of magnetite, perhaps as an annoying by-product of eating. As these crystal wastes accumulated, the host became more efficient in finding its way to new locations rather than spinning around and around in the dark. Whatever the process, lowly bacteria during billions of years of evolution managed to beat humans to the discovery of the magnetic compass by, oh, about three billion years!

Using magnetite as a clue, scientists have thrown many different organisms under the microscope, and many have now been found to have at least some kind of magnetite embedded in them, including homing pigeons, tuna, honey bees, dolphins, whales, green turtles, and Elvis Presley. Richard Frankel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has gone so far as to herald these discoveries as “the beginning of a new chapter in the story of the interaction of the biosphere with the geomagnetic field.” They may have jumped the gun a bit.

The story has become legendary about how homing pigeon rallies are not held during times when geomagnetic conditions are unstable. Since 1980, studies seem to show that pigeons placed blindfolded in a pen and allowed to move tend to move most often in the direction of magnetic north. No single pigeon has been found to do this, but only large numbers of repeated trials turn up this “behavior.” Very recently, magnetite has been found in a certain anatomical feature of the heads of pigeons called the ethmoid cavity, which at least looks like a potent argument that they have the hardware needed to fashion a magnetic compass. Although there are investigators excited by this evidence, others are not as convinced that pigeons use the magnetic field. Also in 1998, thousands of pigeons suddenly disappeared during an East Coast race. Some were later recovered in distant farms in Ohio. The unlucky pigeon racers, who lost thousands of dollars in trained birds, blamed geomagnetic storms at first, but there was no evidence that any significant disturbances were going on at the time. Perhaps the pigeons suffered a mild head cold or some other malady that spread rapidly through the flock and disoriented them. We will never know for certain what caused this race to be routed so mysteriously.

Sometimes, however, animal navigation can go awry for reasons having nothing to do with some internal magnetic compass. Dolphins and whales seem to have the required magnetite bodies buried inside their heads, and it is reasonable to wonder whether these mammals navigate shallow coastline waters by taking magnetic bearings. Perhaps the numerous whale and dolphin mass beachings that we hear about may come from geomagnetic storms that disrupt their travels and cause them to head to shore. Although this scenario sounds plausible, it may well be that the tragic beachings we hear about from time to time have an entirely man-made cause. In a recent Washington Post article, “Navy Tests Linked to Beaching of Whales,” we hear about the plight of seemingly healthy beaked whales in the Bahamas whose mass strandings have now been tentatively traced to U.S. Navy underwater sonar tests and explosions. High-intensity, low-frequency sonar systems emit loud blasts of noise for detecting quiet enemy submarines. These systems also give whales and other marine mammals “terrific headaches” and severe disorientation. A dozen beaked whales also stranded themselves in Greece in 1996 during NATO exercises using similar “active sonar” systems.

But apart from the fact that some animals seem able to do so, exactly how does an organism “sense” which direction magnetite crystals are pointing inside them? How do you know which way a dollar bill is oriented in your pocket? For magnetotaxic bacteria, the magnetic field of the Earth acts on the magnetite crystals to actually turn them into the correct orientation. Bacteria are so light that even dead ones align with magnetic north like the arrow of a compass. Larger organisms, however, are much too big to be physically moved in this way. They need some internal “magnetic sense” that they can recognize, much as we sense our body orientation thanks to the semicircular canals in our middle ear.

The way some organisms might perceive their magnetic surroundings seems to have been discovered since 1978. Microscopic examination of the magnetite crystals detected inside animals as diverse as rodents and humans turn up nervous tissue surrounding these nodules. That many of these organisms are literally “led by the nose” is suggested by the fact that the magnetite concentrations in pigeons, dolphins, whales, tuna, and marlin are found in the ethmoid cavity, located where the bones of the walls and septum of the nasal cavity join. Are humans left out of this exciting new gold rush of evidence for a hidden sixth sense? Apparently not. Since magnetotaxic organisms were discovered, researchers have also found traces of magnetite in human sinuses in much the same anatomical location as for other large animals.

Searching for a magnetite compass among the billions of cells in an organism is far worse than searching for a magnetic needle in an organic haystack. Also, just because you find magnetite (a not especially rare oxide of iron) inside an organism may not make it a workable compass. Nature, it seems, has also found other peculiar uses for magnetite, causing a variety of different cells to stockpile it for other murky purposes than navigation. There could be good biochemical reasons why organisms accumulate magnetite that may have nothing to do with navigation. For instance, clumps of magnetite produce very powerful local magnetic fields that are known to modify chemical reactions. Some researchers suggest that with magnetite nodules inside cells nature has merely discovered another odd way to catalyze biochemical reactions in certain kinds of cells. To be a good compass, magnetite has to be in the shape of a needle or some other elongated structure. A symmetric nodule simply won’t do. In some organisms that contain magnetite, however, there is no good evidence that magnetite crystals are aligned in this way. For instance, in one human brain cell out of about fifty thousand, magnetite seems to be clumped, but not into long linear chains as they are in bacteria that use them for guidance. Also these “magnetocytes,” as Joseph Kirchvink at the California Institute of Technology calls them, contain magnetite clumps surrounded by “lipid bilayer membranes . . . containing several hundred distinct proteins of unknown function.” According to Kirchvink

They are definitely not used to detect the geomagnetic field as they do not contain linear chains of crystallographically aligned magnetite crystals as do magnetotactic bacteria, protozoans, migratory fish and birds. At the risk of engaging in speculation, our best guess is that the magnetite crystals are important for biochemistry.

While bacteria seem to use aligned crystals to serve as magnetic compasses, there is growing evidence that other animals may use a more subtle “chemical compass” to do the trick. Magnetite clumps that serve to alter biochemical reactions may cause changes that can be sensed. James Weaver, a biophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been looking into how such a chemical direction-finding sense might work, at least mathematically. His findings, based on computer modeling, suggests that the subtle chemical changes produced by magnetite-sensitive reactions is enough to cause feeble magnetic signals to be picked out from the normal noisy hubris of a cell’s environment. Although no one as yet has confirmed that magnetite can function in this way in more complicated organisms, at least there are some plausible connections between the state of the external field and changes at the cellular level. What remains to be shown is that these biochemical changes actually get promoted into an organism’s awareness of orientation. Perhaps, in the future, researchers will inject chemicals that suppress some of these magnetite-catalyzed reactions and test whether the organism “lost their bearings” or not. But perhaps magnetite works not as a transducer of physical orientation but as a modifier of some “psychic compass.”

Another intriguing possibility is that, instead of being biochemically important, the magnetite found dispersed in brain tissue may act in some bioelectric fashion. We have all heard that the brain has a complex electromagnetic “hum” with many different cycles going on all at once: alpha waves, beta waves, etc. An entire biofeedback industry has grown up in the last twenty years to help you modify your brainwaves to make you feel better—at least so the claims say. Curiously, many of these cycles are matched in frequency by far more powerful rhythmic changes in the environmental geomagnetic fields. If human brain tissue contains magnetite, but not in a form that can work as a magnetic compass, could it still act in some way to operate as a “psychic compass”? The evidence seems to suggest that these magnetosomes act to catalyse unknown chemical reactions throughout the brain. We also know that imbalances of neurotransmitters throughout the brain have profound impacts on our moods and other mental states. Could the two be related?

We all know that there are “Lies, damn lies, and statistics,” but in one curious study statistical evidence seemed to show that the admissions to mental hospitals in New York correlated with what space physicists call the geomagnetic Kp index. It is a measure of how unsettled the geomagnetic field is over the whole planet during a three-hour period. Another study found a similar correlation with the Ap Magnetic Activity index (related to the Kp index) in the psychotic outbursts of patients in a Moscow mental institution. According to Wallace Campbell, of the United States Geological Survey in Denver, Soviet researchers in 1977 reported a correlation of geomagnetic events with the number of heart attacks in Sverdlovsk based on three hundred cases. Even deaths from cardiovascular disease seemed more likely to occur within a day of a geomagnetic storm, as do convulsive seizures and reports of hallucinations. In 1995, Juan Roederer, at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, summarized many of these medical studies in an American Geophysical Union article, “Are Magnetic Storms Hazardous to Your Health?” Taken together, they did seem to show that something very odd was going on; as he suggests, it would be a good idea to look into the studies more carefully.

Navigation problems, power outages, and communication interference are all symptoms of solar storms changing our environment and causing natural electromagnetic processes to escalate until they become a technological problem. Changing fields and currents find harbor in wires, cause ionospheric changes, and perturb local magnetic fields. Although these impacts seem a bit remote and elusive at times, now that we have entered the Space Age, we have begun to fall victim to far more direct impacts from these same storms.